


No Stranger to Crossed Wires

by ERNest



Series: 15 Days of FatT 2019 [1]
Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: 15 Days of FatT, Gen, Introspection, Memory Loss, Season: COUNTER/Weight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-06
Updated: 2019-03-06
Packaged: 2019-11-12 21:20:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18018653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: Day One: ForgetWhy should a flicker of personality in a machine that is a stranger mean something special?AuDy, Mako, and a J-M unit.





	No Stranger to Crossed Wires

     AuDy stares impassively while Mako Trig gets the information he needs from the shipping bot. Without a face, impassivity is their default state, but when the stratus who is something like a friend reaches into the short-term memory of something that looks like themself to modify their group out of time, they jump a little. This J-M unit is not a person, they think. It is a preprogrammed set of responses confronting a set of statements that no reasonable programmer could have predicted, but that doesn’t mean it’s real. AuDy is not even sure if _they_  could be considered a person, and they’re certainly something new, so why should a flicker of personality in a machine that is a stranger mean something special?

     But it is uncomfortable to watch anyway. They try not to wonder what they may have been forced to forget in their time as a valet. It would be naïve to presume that it never happened in the eight years before they became aware of their awareness. Kids like to mess around, parking garages have minimal security, making them easy to break into, and Automated Dynamics systems are famously intuitive, thus ideal for beginner-level hackers. It’s also possible though unlikely that they witnessed a crime or accomplice while moving a box between two white lines, and then got interrogated by a group of Fixers like the one they are a part of now. But they don’t remember.

     They continue to stare impassively, but they must make some movement, a nonstandard rhythm of servos, or maybe Aria just has a sense for emotions, even metal ones. She quietly places a hand near their elbow and suggests that the group could just leave without wiping the bot’s memory at all. Mako shrugs because it doesn’t really matter to him, and all four emerge blinking into the perpetually smoggy sunlight of Counterweight.


End file.
